A significant representative of a generation of French philosophers who are distinguished by their original interventions during the past forty years; a central participant in the deconstructive approach to Western thought; a radical thinker who reconsiders a number of controversial questions such as democracy, community, Christianity, as well as the very possibility of sense itself; an insightful reader of works of visual culture; a regular interlocutor of artists and collaborator in projects combining philosophy and art; an author of texts on the margins of autobiographical discourse and at the interstices of friendship and intellectual work: translated into numerous languages, Jean-Luc Nancy has attained a position of singular importance in the field of the contemporary human and social sciences.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s work is one which is shaped by an insistence upon notions such as finitude and singularity as plurality (Being Singular Plural), democracy as the opening of a space to be shared vis-à-vis the potential totalitarianism of the political (The Truth in Democracy), community and communitarianism (The Inoperative Community), the atheological and/or anarchic version of the divine (The Deconstruction of Christianity), the philosophical narration of the corporeal and the personal (Noli Me Tangere, The Intruder), pleasure/jouissance (La jouissance), or the work of art as a unique material explosion of sense.

Beyond the specific character of these interventions, Jean-Luc Nancy combines an interest in questions touching upon both the political and the intimate, or on the uncertain zone between the two. It is precisely this double character of his work that is evident in the presentation of his most recent book, The Other Portrait (2014): “The portrait, the image of the face. The face, visibility of the intimate. The other portrait: image of the more than intimate, of the invisible, of the other in the same. Image of what cannot be imagined and cannot be figured. If the portrait insists and resists today in the practices of the visual forms, it is simply because what insists and resists in it, obsessively, almost invisible, the most intimate of what one might call ‘art’ ”.

This conference is organized in a space, Athens, whose parameters are invested with a political charge. It seeks to pose, à propos of Jean-Luc Nancy’s texts, a mode of inquiry guided by the following indicative questions: what is the position of the intimate in contemporary forms of the political? What is the singular importance of Jean-Luc Nancy’s project at a moment when everything already seems to have been described, by definition, as political? What are the polarities and intertwinings to come between the intimate and the political? In what manner are the intimate and the political themselves related to other concepts which have been systematically interrogated by deconstruction, such as the secret? How can the intimate re-inform our understanding of the political, re-form it and, finally, reinforce it? What type of challenge or obligation can it represent for philosophy and cultural or political theory? Beyond the form of narrative, what other alternative paths are open to approach it?

Jean-Luc Nancy will honor this conference with his presence and friendship.